This Is Amazing: Maker of Puzzle Finds Few Wanting to Try It

PITTSBURGH—The world's largest hand-drawn maze is short on people who want to solve it.

What does it take to make the world's largest hand-drawn maze? Someone to solve it. WSJ's John Miller talks to a Pittsburgh cartoonist who's aiming to make the Guinness Book Of World Records.

Joe Wos, 42 years old, is putting the finishing touches on a 35-foot-long, 4-foot-wide maze filled with thousands of U-turns, intersections and dead ends, and populated with frogs, tuna and pancakes. He is hoping for a world record, but one requirement is that somebody else solve it. That is a problem. Nobody really wants to.

"Let's face it, it will be a pain," acknowledges Mr. Wos, who estimates the task at 30 to 40 hours. There is also a slim chance he has inadvertently sealed the winning path. "I'm 99.4% sure it can be solved," he says.

ENLARGE

Joe Wos with some of his characters.
Joe Wos

He has asked family, friends and a board member on the ToonSeum, a small cartoon museum in downtown Pittsburgh that Mr. Wos founded and directs.

All said no. The board member, Harold Behar, says he has "done some of Joe's smaller mazes, but this one, I just said, 'forget it.' "

Mr. Wos hasn't advertised widely or sought volunteers from local universities, but he posted a plea on Facebook. It went unanswered. The marketing director of the ToonSeum agreed to try to solve the maze if no one else steps forward. "I do probably have better things to do," says Mandi Bridgeman.

Like many children, Mr. Wos, the son of a Pittsburgh steelworker, doodled. The doodles, spread across huge pieces of paper hung on the walls of his family home, often turned into mazes. He grew up and quit mazes. But as he approached the age of 40, he wanted to achieve "some lifelong goals," one of which was to get into Guinness World Records.

"All the records were sports records, or things like standing on one leg for a long time," says Mr. Wos. "I knew I could create something."

ENLARGE

Joe Wos works on his attempt at the world's largest hand-drawn maze. He needs to find someone to solve it.
John W. Miller/The Wall Street Journal

Guinness already had six maze-related records, including corn field and garden mazes as well as the longest walk through a horror house maze (the Dead or ALIVE house in Ube, Japan), and the longest ice maze (Arctic Glacier Ice Maze at the Buffalo Powder Keg Festival in Buffalo, N.Y., in February 2010). But there was nothing on hand-drawn mazes, says Sara Wilcox, a spokeswoman.

Guinness accepted Mr. Wos's proposal on condition that it be 10 square meters, or 107.6 square feet, drawn by him alone, with witnesses—five people are witnessing and signing off at regular intervals—and that it be solvable.

Mr. Wos began drawing July 27 and hopes to finish by the end of September. He uses a black Sharpie, rather than a pencil and eraser.

When he makes a mistake, he turns it into an illustration. He spent 20 minutes drawing a factory and realized he had closed off his exit so he put an "Out of Order" sign on it and picked up from an open spot. "As I'm drawing the maze, I keep five or six open spots," to avoid boxing himself in, he says.

Puzzles

He has woven 50 illustrations into his maze, including some from paid sponsors, from whom he has raised $4,000, so he can take the maze to museums and fairs. StarKist, a unit of South Korea's Dongwon Industries, paid $500 for Mr. Wos to draw its iconic cartoon tuna into the center. Visit Pittsburgh is a sponsor, so there will be the Steel City skyline. His biggest sponsor is Schell Games, a Pittsburgh-based videogame designer, which paid him $2,000 to incorporate its logo into the maze. CEO Jesse Schell says he has always been fascinated by mazes. "I might give it a try," he says.

Other drawings are inspired by appetite. "You'll see pancakes in the drawing, or a nice juicy steak," Mr. Wos says, drawn when he was hungry. Impatient to get home, he drew a car, packed and ready to go. "I think that mazes can be a form of graphic storytelling. They just traditionally haven't been."

Indeed, mazes, which evolved from single-path labyrinths, first appeared around 1500, when they were incorporated into Renaissance gardens in Italy, says maze expert Adrian Fisher, author of "The Art of the Maze." Mirror mazes and other variations followed in the 19th century, with the rise of fairs and expositions and amusement parks, says Mr. Fisher, who has designed over 600 mazes in 30 countries.

"There are only 150 mirror mazes in the world, and I've designed 43 of them," says Mr. Fisher, who also helped the city of London design bus maps and a water maze around a yellow submarine at a Beatles exhibition in Liverpool that was attended by the Queen of England. He charges about $500,000 for an elaborate mirror maze. Corn mazes are less expensive at about $50,000.

Mr. Fisher, who will only create mazes that can be walked through, draws a clear distinction between himself and Mr. Wos. "What he's doing is freehand, just following his imagination," says Mr. Fisher. "When you're designing a maze which had to go into the grounds of a castle with a moat, like I do, every inch counts, and you can't just freestyle."

ENLARGE

Part of Joe Wos's largest-maze entry
Joe Wos

Mr. Fisher said he would say no if Mr. Wos asked him to complete the puzzle.

Richard Brightfield, an 85-year-old writer and artist who once ghostwrote installations of the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown series, has designed over 2,000 mazes. The largest was 1 foot by 2 feet for a book fair in San Francisco. Although solving Mr. Wos's maze is an intriguing thought, he says he couldn't sit long enough on the ground to complete it.

A better choice might be children.

Kids "have a much easier time solving mazes because they don't project lines that aren't there," says Mr. Brightfield. "Adults have preconceptions."

Mr. Wos also asked his 10-year-old son.

"I said no because I thought it was too hard," says Wiley Wos. "I prefer electronic devices." How much would he charge to do it? "Twenty dollars," says the 10-year-old. "An hour."

Undaunted, Mr. Wos continues, although he has one peeve. "I want 50-year-old dads to stop hitting their kids's shoulders and saying 'Hey look, that's a-maz-ing'," he says. "They all think they're the first one."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.